Is it gaming? I’ve seen my friends play games on the Ipad, and some of them are incredible creative. If you look at the top apps, both free and paid, around 90% of them are games. But they seem like the type of games you play for an afternoon, or during your bus ride to work, and then the novelty wears off.
A high-potential category related to gaming is social games. The kind of collaborative games where you work to develop something – either a character, a map, a farm, a space station, etc.., could be important on the ipad. Many of these games are already popular on the Iphone, but would get a nice boost from the larger screen and increased capabilities of the ipad. Becuase I don’t envison people using their ipad’s for longer than 10 minutes per session, it seems well suited for these apps.
The other large category is small versions of web sites. You have apps like facebook, yelp, twitter, and the Google suite. But these utilities are also available on every other platform – not uniquely on the ipad.
Besides my bus ride to work I can’t imagine a time that I would use a device like the ipad. I suppose it could be used to watch movies at night, but I might as well us my flatscreen TV, which has a much larger screen and a PC hooked up to it. Why would I want to to watch movies on a 9 inch screen? So it would probably sit on the coffee table while I watch the flatscreen, and I would occasionally pick it up and check my e-mail. Again, nothing I can’t already do with my phone.
What about ebooks? My coworker has both the ipad and the kindle, and he says the kindle is more pleasant to read.
Maybe ahead of it’s time?